We’re so far from heroic gestures on fire escapes now. Our beginning was a long time ago. Now there’s a patch of my heart that’s an open sore, like an ulcer pulsing on the ventricle, or the aorta, or whatever the fuck you call it. And now there’s no heart left for the baby. I thought I could make room but I can’t. Johnny and Harry took all the heart space I had. And now there’s not enough.
The pain is nothing new. The grief and shock and anger, as familiar as my name. But when I became a mother the pain multiplied and grew and stretched my skin and bent my back as far as it would go because the pain a mother feels is not just hers. She feels everyone’s pain; she picks it up for her kids, she carries it for the family, she takes it from her parents when they’re too old to bear it. She cries when she sees the crying mothers on the news; she tears up when she sees a kid in a wheelchair in the supermarket; she sobs when that Save the Children ad comes on; she has to leave the room when the old man’s wife loses the baby in Up and that’s just a fucking cartoon. Because more than the pain of the person who’s hurting she feels the pain of his mother. Of all the mothers. They feel hers too.
But what the fuck do I know?
I know this. This is why it’s hard to love me and hard for me to love. And why I love so hard when I do. Because this is what I carry. And last night Harry left his shoes by the door again and that’s where I found them this morning so I pick them up, I open the door and I hurl them across the street as hard as I can. One lands in the middle of the road and the other one lands on the neighbor’s BMW, setting off the car alarm. And Harry’s yelling at me now, and Johnny’s screaming too and the baby’s crying and all of them plus the car alarm—they’re shattering my skull from the inside and it’s time to go.
So I leave them and I start walking.
Manhattan to Staten Island, September 2001
We want to know more than we want to survive. We want to know what death looks like before we run away from it. But we don’t know that about ourselves until it’s happening. Until we see it we don’t know that we’re the kind of people who run toward death; the kind of people who don’t run away even when it’s coming for us.
The edge of Manhattan vibrates. Hundreds of people, all of us silent. All of our hearts stop at once. A pause, a moment of quiet, a shared understanding, wordless and bone deep. There is a sound—a drone, long and low, not of our world. We hear it, and then we run. Not toward the terminal doors, to the boat, to safety. We turn around and run to the huge windows, built stories high for the view of lower Manhattan at a time that we would never know again, when our city stood untouchable, piercing the sky. We run to the windows to see the sun blotted out and the City vanish under the smoke and horror, ash and tragedy. We run to the wall of glass, put our hands on the windows, hundreds of pairs of hands reaching for the panes, palms outstretched, like we could stop it. The need to know, the need to put out our hands—so much stronger than the instinct to survive.
On the boat I sit down across from a woman covered in white dust, all over her suit and her hair. She doesn’t brush it off. She doesn’t know it’s there. She’s shaking, no shoes, no bag, just wearing a suit and nylon hose. She takes the life jacket from under her seat and puts it on, trembling and silent. Other people do it too because maybe the Staten Island Ferry’s the next thing to blow up.
I get up and go to the back of the boat where the doors are open to see if the City’s still there but there’s nothing except a cloud of gray smoke. It takes a long time to sail out of the cloud. Or maybe it doesn’t but that’s how it feels. When we pass the Statue of Liberty, sunlight glinting off her torch, somebody starts shouting and people panic because maybe she’s the next to blow up. Everyone was relieved to have escaped Manhattan. But now there’s a realization seeping through the decks that maybe we’re just floating in our graves.
I walk to the steps that go to the next deck up. Keep moving, stay close to the exits, in case, in case…
I focus on one step at a time, one at a time, and then there’s his shoes on the landing. Black wing tips but all the decorative holes in the leather are gray, filled in by the falling ash. He must have been caught up in the cloud when he was running for the ferry. I look up at him. The shoulders of his suit are white, as if he just came in from a blizzard. His forehead is smudged with dust, like Ash Wednesday, except today is Tuesday. He waits for me to reach the landing.
He says, “Hello. Are you alright?” He puts a hand on my elbow.
“No. Are you?”
“No, I don’t think I am,” he says. A long silence. There’s nothing to say. I don’t know this man. I mean, I do, he works in the building across from mine and he’s British, that’s in the accent, but he’s talking to me like we know each other. Except we don’t.
“Do you need a place to go?” I say, conscious that his hand is still on my elbow, even when we aren’t speaking. Under different circumstances
